Top Ten Tuesday - Horses

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Covers with [Item] on the Cover (You choose the item! It can be anything at all.)

Today is a public holiday here in Melbourne for the Melbourne Cup. Yes, we have a public holiday for a horse race. Therefore, my post this week is all about horses! I actually started this post a few years ago and then came up with other posts on the dates closest to Melbourne Cup day, but this year everything aligned and it was time to roll it out.

The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis - I read this in my pre-blogging days, which is a very long time ago indeed!

The Water Horse by Julia Gregson - This book tells the story of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson - I read this in pre-blogging days as well and don't remember much about it!

The Shadowy Horses by Susanna Kearsley - Having recently visited a Roman archeological site, I feel like Ishould maybe revisit this book, which is all about the lost Roman Legion. (My review)

The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons - This book is actually named for a statue of horse in St Peterburg but it still counts for this topic

The Horse Dancer by Jojo Moyes - I haven't read this book but I have read others by her..

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy - I have owned this book for 18 months or so, but I still haven't read it.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks - I haven't read this one either, but I have seen her speak and read a few of her books.

The Valley of the Horses by Jean Auel - Another pre blogging read. 

Foals Bread by Gillian Mears - I really didn't like this book but it definitely fits the theme.

So there are ten books that feature horses in the title, or 9 books with a picture of a horse on the cover

Sunday Salon: My Melbourne Writer's Festival (part 2)

The Melbourne Writer's Festival is over for another year. While I didn't go to as many sessions this year as I did last year I did enjoy the sessions that I did attend and I got to see some authors that I have really enjoyed reading their books.

I will say now that I don't intend to write too much about the sessions, but I may be deluding myself a little.

Last weekend I mentioned The Morning Read session that I attended and enjoyed. The next session was a Fine Romance which featured Stephanie Laurens, Su Dharmapala and Rachel Treasure. The main reason for attending this session was because I wanted to support the romance sessions that were being held at the festival this year as there are many years when romance is not represented at all. Having said that, the session ended up being very interesting in it's own right. Of the authors, I had only read Rachel Treasure before, but that was many years ago and in some ways I very much see her as one of the initial examples of rural literature that has been very popular over the last couple of years that are pretty much romances written from the perspective of the female characters

What inspires you to write about love?

Rachel started with a quote from Louise Hay - you are either in a place of love or place of fear. She not only writes about love but also a love of land and food, a love of country

For Su, love is part of the human emotional landscape and the narrative binds us all together. Love is about connection. Everyone is on a quest for love in some way. It is one of most critical human quests.

For Stephanie, as a genre writer it is all about entertaining, love or the quest for love and the development of the emotional relationship between hero and heroine.

What is role of culture within their books?

Rachel said that all stories need shape and her books show search for self love and her characters live country life passionately.

Su felt that culture defines modes of courtship. Her book, The Wedding Season, explored the notion of arranged marriages within the Sri Lankan culture. She had the whole crowd laughing at her stories of her mother trying to set her up with lots of good young men. One of the advantages is that you know that your mother is not going to try and set you up with a loser and so Su treated it as a dating service where a lot of the vetting has already been done.

Stephanie explained that for her culture is something that shouldn't play too much of a role as the romance needs to work universally and she talked about some of the languages that her books have been translated into to show that her books do work universally. Culture is more the backdrop. The reason the Regency is so beloved is because before that time for the the rich marriage was a contract for rearrangement of assets but in the late 1700s the romance movement was discussed in the aristocracy so by the time of the Regency there was the choice to marry for love or money or dynasty or not at all and so there are parallels with modern life.

There are similarities between their characters, despite the very different natures of their books?

When Rachel wrote her books, she wanted to write about the women she knew - women who drank and smoked and swear, who want to be and quite often are farmers in their own right. She wanted to put some positive examples out in the world for both men and women.

Su comes from a corporate background and she met women in that world who were far scarier than the men. They were juggling life including families, yet they were strong figures in their own right. She doesn't know many princesses because they are too busy actually doing things!

Stephanie talked about the fact that her characters are archetypes because they audience recognises and wants those archetypes. For example, there is a fantasy of a strong woman bringing an alpha male to their knees but most of us wouldn't really want to be with an alpha male! Later a question from the audience came back to this point and asked if that archetype sometimes limited options in terms of individual characters in different books to which Stephanie responded that the archetypes are the framework, there is still plenty of scope for individuality once you flesh it out.

What have you learned about men in the process of writing your books.

Rachel lives and works in a very male environment. She also said that she was looking for reader response rather than great literary reviews and it makes her day to get reader feedback from male readers

Su was quite adamant that we need to get past gender divide and look more at the emotions and human needs that we have in common. Culture defines what men perceive they should be.

Stephanie said that she is an equal opportunity writer. She is better known for her hero characters but you can't have a relationship when you only focus on one side.

What about passion?

Rachel was very open about the fact that she does a lot of research! She does find herself looking at lots of situations with her author brain turned on. When things are happening, maybe even during sex, she finds herself thinking that feels nice, how do I convey that on paper.

Su's only sex scene got axed mainly because it didn't keep in context with the theme. Can reduce intimacy and sex to performance art, but she is looking for intimacy between the characters.

Stephanie indicated that spicy sex scenes are one of her hallmarks, but that you can't have a love scene without it having purpose and without it driving the story forward. It reflects part of the emotional development of the characters and shows communication through intimacy. It isn't just ever a love scene.

This was truly a very interesting session, and I came out wanting to read Su's book The Wedding  Season sooner rather than later. I have heard Stephanie Laurens speak before and she is very interesting to listen to as she has the romance genre pegged with an analysts mind (she was a scientist before she started writing). At one point an audience member talked about romance covers and being seen in public with them, and she pointed out that the romance covers are designed for the American market, not for the Australian market which is so small, and that often is designed for the big chains like Walmart. They want readers to be able to know exactly what kind of book that they are getting as they walk through stores like Walmart and just grab books off the shelf without necessarily even reading the blurbs, hence the proliferation of very similar looking covers.

After a brief gap where we got to meet Michelle from Book to the Future and author Kylie Ladd, the next session that we (being Bree and myself) attended was In Conversation with Gillian Mears, hosted by Ramona Koval.

Whilst I didn't particularly enjoy her book Foal's Bread, I was interested to find out more about Mears herself.

I will just some dot point about her session.

- The origin of the book Foal's Bread was actually a pencil sketch that her sister did at her request. Mears also mentioned that she actually still writes in pencil.

- She explained what a foal's bread is - sometimes found in the placenta after a horse gives birth, it looks like liver. People thought they were lucky and would dry them out and keep them.

- Gillian Mears sees this as a book about love.

- Her previous books seem to be sketches towards Foal's Bread.

- She went to old cemeteries to find names that were representative of the period.

- Mears admits that she has something of a love affair with the 1930s. She sees it as a more gracious era but also tough. She loves the language of the time - phrases like cracking tough. Part of the appeal of this period is the old horseman that she has personally known and loved. She sometimes feels like an impostor in the modern world. For example, she hasn't made the leap into the Ipod world!

- The author talked a lot about horses saying that for a girl, a horse is between father and lover emotionally. I never really was a horsey girl so this isn't something that I necessarily empathise with but still. The last words in the book are the names of her childhood horses. If she was blindfolded she would know them by the feel of each individual horse. Horses are living teachers. They teach how to be courageous through their generosity to the rider.

- Now that she is wheelchair bound, she feels a real grief at the thought of never being able to ride again. She can't even smell the coat of a horse as she knows that she would get emotional.

- Mears touched on the incest theme in the book, which I must admit is something that I really struggled with when I read the book, and I don't feel as though the conversation helped me at all with that sense of uncomfortableness. It is however a trigger topic for me and I know this.

- She was worried about publishing the book because her sister had also written a book about showjumping. She felt as though she might be her territory but she also felt that she needed to honour the characters who just wanted to burst into life.

- When asked about her sister's reaction to her success, Gillian suggested that there was familial pride but also a feeling that Gillian was luckier than her sister, which links into old hurts.

- She is now working on a book called The Cat with a Coloured Tale which will be published by Walker Books. She feels that it may be her greatest book. It is very simple and light whilst being not unrelated to Foal's Bread.

- When asked has her way of writing changed she admitted that she hasn't actually started the process of writing from scratch since she had to start using a wheelchair and she is worried about it. She relied on walking as part of her writing process. Now her rituals of writing will need to change.


I still have a couple of sessions to write about but that will have to wait as it is very late here now and Monday morning is nearly here already.I will write them up during the week.

I thought I would finish with some other photos I took while at MWF last week.

The book market and official bookstore

Festival Banner

In the queue for Gillian Mears

It was a very literate queue

Inside the Edge theatre where the Gillian Mears event was held

The Fed Square architecture

You can read Bree's recap of the A Fine Romance session and the Gillian Mears session by clicking on the links.

Currently Reading

A History of Love by Nicole Krauss, A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper, and I am listening to Taking a Shot by Jaci Burton.

Up Next

Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan and The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.

Foal's Bread readalong - Chapter 20 to end

Welcome to Foal's Bread, Gillian Mears' first novel in sixteen years, one eagerly awaited by Gillian's passionate readers. It is worth the wait.

Set in hardscrabble farming country and around the country show high-jumping circuit that prevailed in rural New South Wales prior to the Second World War, Foal's Bread tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and their fortunes as dictated by fate and the vicissitudes of the land.

It is a love story of impossible beauty and sadness, a chronicle of dreams "turned inside out", and miracles that never last, framed against a world both heartbreakingly tender and unspeakably hard.

Written in luminous prose and with an achingly affinity for the landscape the book describes, Foal's Bread is the work of a born writer at the height of her considerable powers. It is a stunning work of remarkable originality and power, one that confirms Gillian Mears' reputation as one of our most exciting and acclaimed writers.

And so we come to the end of the Foal's Bread readalong. Even now at the end of the experience I can't decide if I am glad to have made it to the end of the book or just relieved that it was over.

This section was the shortest of the sections that we had to read, and it was pretty dramatic. I really can't talk too much about what happened during these final chapters without major, major spoilers, but that impending doom that was prevalent in the earlier sections pretty much were not unwarranted.

I guess the key to this book will really be how readers react to Noah, and even in this final section I am torn in my reaction. Could I have done what she did - definitely no in both cases. Did a part of me cheer when she stepped in and did what she did for Lainey - a little. Did my heart break for her children - absolutely.

One thing that I did find myself wondering is what happened to George. We meet Lainey when she returned to One Tree later in her life but there is not a lot mentioned about him. I was so glad that we did have this final section to finish off the story because without it the book would have ended at quite a morose place.

It was interesting that the author choose to have a preamble and a coda rather than the more usual prologue and epilogue. I wonder what the significance of that choice was in the author's mind.

For those of us participating in the readalong, there have been differing reactions to the book, some more enthusiastic, but we have all talked at some points about the difficulties of the subject matter, the language and more. This is definitely not an easy read. I guess how much you enjoy it will very much depend on your own life experiences and your taste in literature. For me, this touched a couple of topics that are very close to home and that certainly impacted on my reaction to the book, especially my reaction to Noah.

To read the thoughts of other participants in the readalong visit the following links:

The Book Nerd Club
The Talking Teacup
My Journal of Becoming a Writer
Fantasy vs Reality
Slightly Addicted to Fiction
The Book Nook

Thanks to Danielle from Book Nerd Club for hosting the readalong and Allen and Unwin for providing the review copy.

Foal's Bread Readalong - Chapters 14 to 19

What a difference a week makes!

I am not sure if it is something in the book, or if it was just that once I had vented last week about my feelings in relation to Noah I was freer to read, but this week the reading was much easier and much more enjoyable.

It was a very eventful section of the book! The war ends but at One Tree Farm life is getting harder as Roley's illness continued to get worse, Noah has to take on more and more of the farm tasks, but on the good side of the coin Lainey finally got her chance to shine.

I did think that the way that the author described the worsening of Roley's still unnamed illness was exceptional. From what I gather from the few news articles there are around, the author may have been through similar health experiences and that would certainly give her first hand experience of the various symptoms.

I was so pleased with the chapters that dealt with Lainey's performance in the show! It had that sort of feeling to it of the triumph of the underdog - at one point I was reminded of the scenes towards the end of Strictly Ballroom, with the crowd going wild and the winning couple all triumphant. I loved this quote from page 281:

So that on this day, even if never again, she'd know that the impossible becomes possible when the valley inside your belly lays itself open, running as if with deep rivers and trees so steep and green it must be how One Tree Farm and others looked before the hills were cleared.

She would cherish the quality of a showground forever, its circle so calmly fenced. She would remember how an announcer's voice could take on the quality of a prophet. How for a moment after landing it was as though streams of sunlight, not old leather reins at all, were connecting her hands to Landwind's mouth.

You will notice I haven't said much at all about Noah so far. She is certainly the character that I react most vividly to but not in a good way. When Lainey came home, I just wanted to slap her for the way that she destroyed her daughter's happiness, especially given how much Lainey looked up to her;

All her life up until then, Lainey Nancarrow had watched her mother, copied her mother, and just when she'd succeeded behind her wildest imaginings, just when their Chalcedite foal, their Landwind, had really jumped - oh, like a bird, everybody had kept on saying - too late Lainey realised she'd gone too far.

Noah seems to be heading into full on alcoholism and becoming hard and bitter, and for me, it is painful to watch. As the child of an alcoholic, it is hard to watch Noah unraveling through the pages of the book.

This week, we finish off the book, and I hope to see good things for Lainey, but I suspect we have some more hard yards to work through first, because that just seems to be the way this book is.

For other thoughts about this week's section head over to the other readalong participants:

The Book Nerd Club
The Talking Teacup
My Journal of Becoming a Writer
Fantasy vs Reality
Slightly Addicted to Fiction
The Book Nook

Foal's Bread Readalong - Chapters 7 to 13

I sat down this morning and read this week's chapters 7 through 12 while my son was playing cricket. It is probably some kind of reflection of how much I am struggling with this book that I gave a sigh of dejection when I realised that I should have read one more chapter.

I am not really sure what it is that isn't working for me in relation to this book. The language is challenging, the tone of the book is kind of dense. The characters have hope but as a reader you can't help but feel that hope is misplaced, certainly in the first half of the book.

In last week's post I tried to tip toe around this but I don't think I can do that this week.

I do know what one factor I am struggling with is but it is something that I can't talk about at length without kind of spoiling. I say kind of because this is revealed in the very beginning chapter of the book so it can't be a huge spoiler, but it does or rather, it should influence the characters for the rest of the book!

*****SPOILER WARNING*****

The main female character is Noah, and we learn very early on in the book that she was sexually abused by her uncle and had a baby as a result. We are left to assume what happens to the baby, as is Noah, and that aspect works okay for me in terms of her wondering about the child and feeling guilty about abandoning her child. Where it isn't working for me in terms of Noah's emotional reactions to being sexually abused.

Now, to be fair, sexual abuse is a hot button issue for me and so it does have to be very well written for me to read it, but having the choice to read or not read a book featuring these themes I would choose not to. There was nothing in any of the promotional material that I have seen that indicated that these are the types of issues that feature and in a way I feel kind of ambushed by it.

I guess the thing is that the character's emotional journey doesn't feel real to me, bearing in mind that we obviously don't see every waking moment of every day. Noah seems to have transitioned from young girl to teen to wife to mother with barely a nod to the emotional upheaval that each of these events would necessarily have to someone with that background.

Let me give you an example. One of the major issues in the story is the onset of a mysterious illness to Rowley who is Noah's husband. It is only as Rowley starts to get sick that we start to see the emotional effects on Noah - a volcanic tempo, drinking etc and to me they seem to be more of a reaction to those events rather than to her past. To be honest, I was a little relieved to see any reaction at that point.

Rowley is gradually losing feeling in his limbs and has lost sexual functionality as well. Noah is quite rightly feeling neglected in this area and so she tries to raise some interest. When that fails she basically thinks to herself  that at least my uncle wouldn't have let my effort go to waste.

I can only reflect on the stories that I know from various survivor's account, but I am pretty sure that none of the adult survivors of abuse that I know would have that thought pattern. When that happened, and it happened more than once, I actually felt physically sick.

I know that every survivor's story and reactions are different so maybe there are some who do have these thought patterns, but I can tell you right now that even after being by myself for more than nine years there is not one night that I lay in bed and think something like that about the man that abused me.

*****END SPOILER*****

It feels as though the focus of the book is about to shift from Noah and Rowley to their daughter Lainey, so I will keep reading, but at this stage I can't see this being a book that I will be able to say I enjoyed.  Then again, it may well be a book that keeps me thinking for a long time - hopefully not in a bad way.

To see what the other bloggers participating in the readalong thought visit the following links:

The Book Nerd Club
The Talking Teacup
My Journal of Becoming a Writer
Fantasy vs Reality
Slightly Addicted to Fiction
The Book Nook